On January 30, 2025, Liberty Science Center hosted Dr. Charles Liu, astrophysics professor at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island, for a new Space Talk, A Trillion Pixels a Night: Mapping the Cosmos with the Vera Rubin Observatory.

The universe is truly unfathomably huge, home to over 2 trillion galaxies, each of which hosts billions of stars and planets of their very own. One of the biggest challenges facing astronomers today is finding ways to study as much of it as possible, keeping an eye out for anything that may be changing. Later this year, astronomers across the globe will have a brand new tool to do just that – the Vera C. Rubin Observatory being built right in Chile.

During his Space Talk, using the largest planetarium in the country, Dr. Liu took us on a journey all the way from Jersey City to the peaks of Cerro Pachón in the Andes mountains to see how the Rubin Observatory will change astronomy. Using the largest camera ever built, the observatory will take extremely detailed images of the southern hemisphere’s night sky for 10 years, observing the entire sky every few nights. With this much coverage of the sky, astronomers will be able to discover changes happening all across the universe from comets and asteroids in our own solar system to exploding stars across the universe. With all of this data, astronomers will also be able to investigate the evolution of our universe and the roles that mysterious forces like dark energy and dark matter have played.

Join us on April 10 for our next Space Talk, Solving the Dark Energy Mystery with Distant Galaxies with Dr. Eric Gawiser, distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University.